Auto-Focus
The essay

AF project starts with a deep technical and theoretical analysis of recent innovations in photography which influenced its language, the approach, images production, distribution and perception and , finally, real or artificial communicative intents. Then, with a sort of provocative aim, I would bring to extreme consequences the effects technical innovations had on photography, on the way we take photos or we perceive them.

Two fundamental themes are at the base of the project: the photography as a medium (pseudo event and photo opportunity) and the technical automatism of focusing.
In fact photographic images influence communication and information, first of all in social and political fields: the concept of photo opportunity and pseudo event are examples of this influence.
Moreover, the automatism affects the act of making photo of the Operator (Barthes), forcing him towards specific aesthetic, compositive and communicative choices.

The principal result of my research has been the creation of new kind of photographic image.
Concerning the theme of the photo, I chose to work on the concept of pseudo-event and of photo-opp. A pseudo-event is an event that exists for the sole purpose of garnering media publicity and serves to no other function in real life. So it’s considered “real” only after it is viewed through news, advertisement, television or other types of media. Linked to this, there is the concept of photo-opp., referred to an opportunity that resulted in a memorable and effective photograph of a politician, or any notable media event. I have to say also that the term has acquired a negative connotation, referring to a carefully planned event, often masqueraded as news. In
this case and drawing on the recent italian political facts, the scene I chose to set up is a scene of a normal interview to a politician within a generic location like a piece where a political meeting just finished.
The choice towards the pseudo-event comes from the fact that this concept suits well my project of taking things to extremes, to provoke. So the image, already in itself “manufactured”, is continually created beyond photographer intensions.
From the technical point of view, I propose an image made of 5 different areas, each composed by 2 variables, focused and unfocused. Total combinations are 32. it’s a digital image which in this way can be reproduced 32 times but in effect it’s a single image created in the same moment it’s visualized. Paradoxically it’s a single image which contains 32; it’ s 32 times potentially different.
All these combinations are comprised between two extremes, i.e. totally focused and totally unfocused. Inside this interval we can also have combinations unnatural such as the one where subjects in foreground and those in background are focused at the same time or the one with
only the journalist focused inside a very little and sharp DoF. All these last hypothesis reveal the artificial character of the scene and the dubious authenticity of the image.

Image is created automatically and accidentally by a device, a script. So it’s mutable and each visualisation is the consequence of an automatic and random creation of the same image, of the apparatus. The interesting thing here is the fact that the focus automatism enter a “new” moment of the image creation process: it’s not before the shot and not even after it but it’s in the exact moment of its visualisation. The automatism of photographic focus combines with that of image production and visualisation.

All these final achievements, in fact, would be the starting point of a new and deeper study about the binomial name sharpness/blur, considering it as a way of expression, communication and representation. Sharpness has always been considered by nature to be the essential and sought objective after property in a photography. To fail at sharpness was meant to fail at the craft and at the resulting image. Sharpness of an object and photographic representation were an identical end.

Moreover, while certain technical requirements have to be fulfilled to gain a sharp image in photography, this was never needed in painting and drawing. There was no reflection on blur, neither motion blur nor out of focus blur in the history of painting. The concept of blur as a pictorial technique has been an achievement of the historic photographic turn.

So Focus, as being conceived against its own failure, is the history of blur.

I will continue to work on this project looking for make it stronger, both in its teoretic and its practical fields, for evolve the concept of an Automatic Photographic Image; An image out of control of the Operator (R.Barthes) both for the decision about framing, about the choise of the subject and about its communicative and informative values.

I would like to suggest a new type of medium that come out from regula canons of the actual media. Make it part, really and provocatively, of an informative system that is more and more based on the importance of the photographic image as a media of communication.